Expert: Kevin Stohlmeyer - 1/11/2010

Question
Hi Kevin,
I am an artist and need to send in my portfolio in print form to various galleries. So the quality of the print is very important to me... I have scanned in my images at high res cleaned them on photoshop element and saved them as tiffs and jpegs. I now need to compose my images in illustrator and save as pdf files. Alls well except that the image seems to loose its quality and if there is a way to work the images first on photoshop elements before getting it to illustrator to finally save as pdf! I can understand a bit of what is to be done if you could help me break down the tasks i need to do in the various programs and in which order!!
Please do answer to my question in a step by step methodical fashion which I can follow and not go wrong.

Thank You very much!
Dali

Answer
Hi Dali,

You should actually be using InDesign for this, but in Illustrator there are a couple of things you need to do. First under Effects>Document Raster Effects Settings, make sure it is set to hi-res (300 or higher depending on your scans).

Next, place your images and save them using the File>Save as command. Choose PDF and in the PDF dialog box, use the Presets at the top. Choose Press Quality. This is a general setting for printing. You could also use the X-1 series, but unless you know the gallery can take these kind I would stick with Press.


Thanks

Kevin